Thursday, May 24, 2012

I honestly don't have anything new to add to this situation, but I wanted to throw together a few links for you to follow (legally even!) if you want to try and figure out what's going through the heads of the administrators at Canadian Universities that are planning to sign on with the Access Copyright - AUCC Model Licence. I can sure think of better places for a University to spend a large amount of money!

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Greg Notess, one of the first to see the possibilities of screencasting in libraries, has just announced that his new book, Screencasting for Libraries, part of the excellent ALA Tech Set series, has now been published. I had a chance to review this title a couple of months ago and found it an excellent guide for those getting started, and it also includes some good tools and suggestions for the seasoned screencaster.

There's a companion website that provides a couple of useful tools, but I found the section where Greg covers chapter 5, Implementation, fascinating. In chapter 5 Greg walks you through 12 different projects, using several different approaches and tools. In the companion website, you can actually see the end result of each of those projects - a wonderful (and obvious, for this subject) was to complete the learning loop.

Thursday, May 10, 2012

Educause has just released a new ebook called Game Changers: Education and Information Technologies, which you can download for free. I just ran a quick search through the 388-page PDF version and see that libraries are mentioned in a significant way about a half-dozen times, so you might find it worth your while to take a peek at least. Follow the link above to get to the table of contents as well; it's far too long to repost here! Here's the blurb from the site:

How can we reach more learners, more effectively, and with greater impact?

Education changes lives and societies, but can we sustain the current model? New models and new technologies allow us to rethink many of the premises of education—location and time, credits and credentials, knowledge creation and sharing.

Game Changers: Education and Information Technologies is a collection of chapters and case studies contributed by college and university presidents, provosts, faculty, and other stakeholders. Institutions are finding new ways of achieving higher education’s mission without being crippled by constraints or overpowered by greater expectations.

Find out who is changing the game and what we can learn from their different approaches in Game Changers.